Split the Bill (via Monzo.me)

Yes! This has got to be my number 1 frustration with Monzo at the moment. I look so stingy because I’ll never pick up the bill first and let people pay me later, I’m always the one wanting to keep my budgets right. Every month I go over my £500 budget on paper, but looking through the transactions, I’ve had over £100 extra put it from friends. I should be able to link top ups to expenses. If I spent £50 on a meal, then receive a £25 ‘Top Up’ from a friend, I want that to count against my spending and cancel it out.

I personally would like to see a £25 meal. Then once I click on it, it would say ‘£150 cost’ followed by a list of ‘£25 Top Ups’ from each of the people that paid me. All neatly packed under one expense. And only counting my contribution towards my budget.

10 Likes

How about showing a list of people near your location, then you can just tap on their names and split the bill with them?

1 Like

Hi,

Great idea! This has been raised by someone in the past and added to the extraordinary ideas Trello board :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Let me share a small sneak peek for that…

It will take a while until we build it though :slight_smile:

13 Likes

This is looking great as a feature. Though as you may be splitting with someone that is not with you in person how do you track those requests?

It would be great if you could have a ‘pending payments’ area that lists all the outstanding requests. Where you can then ‘prompt’ or ‘settle’ should they need reminding or have paid you by other means. This could then tie into the budgets by showing the true balance spent and reduce when the payments are received.

In the same way you can mark an eBay parcel as dispatched if you didn’t use the eBay built in mailing feature.

I might not have all people I’m potentially having dinner with as my phone contact. How would it work then?
I can understand that adding people could be minimal prerequisite to proceed - how can you pay someone if you don’t know a single thing about.

I’m more interested in flow that will happen when having dinner with 4 people, I have phones/monzo for 2 of them and no details about other 2.
Simplest direct option would be to ask for their phones, add them to contacts, then check Monzo split bill, contact are already there. But it’s weirder flow, requires going to 2 apps.
Easier option would be to offer option to add phone while already splitting the bill. With permission to Contacts (write, not just read), contact can be added to the phone and at the same time, appear as valid contact we can split the bill with.

1 Like

Remember that bill splitting is simply generating Monzo.me links. So you can send those to the people you don’t know by text, messenger etc.

Since the description in the screenshot tells you to ask your friends to open the Add Nearby tab too, it looks like that feature will only find other Monzo users - & then they can transfer the money in the app.

I assume it only finds other Monzo users who are in our contacts already. It simply can’t give me name of all monzo users in a restaurant, right? I can’t share Monzo.me link if I don’t know who I should share it with.

I don’t know phones, so I can’t message/text them. If I had known their phone and they are on Monzo, they would appear in my contacts.

To rephrase my question, is Monzo planning some fancy stuff to help me share link with people I don’t have in contacts? Adding people to contacts seems easy enough, question was about nicer flow. :wink:

2 Likes

Btw, we’re adding it on Android too, stay tuned :slight_smile:

3 Likes

I’m glad this is in development! I think bill/cost splitting option is something I would use alot.

I agree that this would be easiest if you could select from your list of contacts (either monzo or non) to send the link directly - for Monzo users this would come up as a notification saying you own X person XX amount of money and click quickly to pay.

I also think grouping payments over a set period of time (e.g. one evening or weekend) would be good for multiple different transactions that may end up needing to be added together before dividing among users. Thanks!

2 Likes

A flaw with this is that a bill is rarely split equally - most of the time someone owes 6 someone else 4 someone else 3 etc

They’ve got that covered. You can do the initial split and then amend individual amounts if you so desire. At least I think that’s what was said.

1 Like

Yes it was :thumbsup:

1 Like

Yes a big frustration for me as well. Needs to be fixed asap if possible

As has been mentioned before, it’s a start in the right direction.

The problem is for those who are trying to stick to the set targets. Particularly is someone hands you the cash. For instance, I pay for a 5-aside football pitch every week. Some pay me via Monzo and some pay me with coins. It’s £40 an hour for the pitch; everyone pays £4. But it looks like I’m spending £160 a month, rather than £16. So it blows my ‘entertainment’ budget to pieces. No idea how you fix that but I think this is a decent example of a (small) problem shared by many.

1 Like

This certainly isn’t ideal at the moment, it’s something that Hugo’s aware of though & working to fix -

I’ve just tried a preview of this, in the TestFlight version of the app. Automatically copying the merchant name & emoji into the Monzo.me notes is a nice touch :heart_eyes:

2 Likes

Just had a play with the new bill-splitting feature. Very smooth journey. Almost makes me want to head out straightaway to try it out :beers:

1 Like

Good feature and very easy to use.
a couple things would make it great:

  • summary view on transaction screen to see who has paid and who is yet to pay
  • sending reminders would be great for those friends who have seem to forgotten (there’s always one)
  • outstanding total per person with transaction history (for multiple transactions)
4 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.